Paul Nehlen Is an Anti-Semitic Clown

Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin primary challenger has made a sport out of trolling Jews on Twitter—and successfully won attention for his extreme views.

by Emma GreenJan 24, 20185 minutes

Source: Carrie Antlfinger / AP

Paul Nehlen is not an important political figure. According to his LinkedIn account, he’s had a successful career working in equipment manufacturing. He ran against Paul Ryan in the Wisconsin Republican primary in 2016 and got trounced; the speaker of the House won nearly 85 percent of the vote. And now, having declared for a second time his intention to unseat Ryan, Nehlen has become a caricature of an anti-Semitic Twitter troll.

The catalog of his absurd comments is too long to detail in full. Better to visit his feed and Ctrl+F search for “Jew” or “JQ”—an abbreviation for “Jewish Question,” a phrase that white supremacists and neo-Nazis use to refer to their paranoid analyses of Jews’ control over society.

But here’s a taste. After published documenting Nehlen’s mobilization of online followers against the “Jewish media,” he out pictures of top media executives at CNN, NBC, with little stars of David superimposed on their faces. “Do the people pictured seem to have anything in common?” he wrote, before apparently deleting the tweet.